


like factories far away

by sinistercacophony



Category: Wanna One (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bad Science, Gen, M/M, Robot AU, android!Woojin, don't be jihoon, jihoon is a stressed out grad student, like really bad suspend your disbelief as high as you can
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-03-31 16:13:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13978806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinistercacophony/pseuds/sinistercacophony
Summary: It's notenough. Jihoon doesn't want something that can learn what it's told to learn. Jihoon wants something that learns because itwants to. Something real.Something more than the sum of its parts.





	like factories far away

**Author's Note:**

> title is from rhinestone eyes by gorillaz (you should go listen to it, it's ~thematic~)

_your rhinestone eyes are like factories far away_

-

Jihoon knows he's hit a wall. The android can speak, kind of, in learned ways, but the way it learns is predictable and so are its reactions. The robot can act surprised, but only because its coding tells it to be, not because it really _is_.

It's not _enough_. Jihoon doesn't want something that can learn what it's told to learn. Jihoon wants something that learns because it _wants to_. Something real. 

Something more than the sum of its parts.

He's failing. He knows this because his advisors tell him that he's not doing well enough. That he needs to change his mind, do something else, work on a more theoretical level or on a less high-tech project.

He doesn't care. He doesn't care about ethics or legality or any of that bullshit.

Jihoon is a computer engineering prodigy. He's been living and breathing code since he was eleven years old. Now, at twenty, he’s been given a graduate scholarship facilitating his research into artificial consciousness and intelligence. They’d provided an android for him to upload the consciousness into, fully capable of human movement, expression, and speech. 

It’s just a question of getting it to work. 

It comes to him one day, after sleeping only three hours in the past forty-two and consuming more Monster energy drinks than medically advisable. 

Jihoon had been to a meeting with his advisor earlier, and it had been just as fruitless and frustrating as all the other meetings. Jihoon refuses to quit, refuses to back down. He _knows_ there’s a way to do what he wants.

In his lab, papers are scattered on every available surface — notes he's taken, thoughts he's written down in moments of inspiration that later turned out to be useless (or useful, but not quite in the way he needed). Various mechanical parts and bits of silicon are scattered on his desk, although he hasn't been putting very much effort into the shell of the thing. The university had provided him with various customization options for the body and face, but it’s hard to focus on aesthetics when all he sees is his failure. It doesn't really matter how nice it looks if he can't sort out the coding to make it run, after all.

At the moment, Jihoon is digging through one of the drifts of paper underneath his desk. Frustration is crawling inside him like a cockroach, threatening to make him sick. He wants to prove them wrong, prove that he _can_ do it. So he’s restlessly digging through all of his old research for something, _anything_ that could give him the breakthrough he needs.

So far he's found jack shit.

All attempts by previous researchers to code true AI had either been cut short (by what, or who, Jihoon isn't sure) or ended in eventual failure.  It has to be possible though, Jihoon tells himself, otherwise people wouldn't be quite so keen to tell him to stop.

He has movement down almost perfectly, working on the backs of researchers previous. It's not difficult to teach AI how to move (it’d been one of the first things people figured out fifty years ago, after all) and he had compiled as much movement code from the university database into his program as possible. He'd even made up some new stuff, added a bunch of information on dance and movement (if he does finally get the stupid thing sentient it would be pretty neat if it shared his hobbies, after all).

He's ruffling through his papers when he finds it, sitting innocently between a detailed description of robotic arm structure and a theoretical paper on collective consciousness.

Neural networking. Not of volunteers, but of people in comas, people who were at the end of their lives but could maybe live on someday if technology got its shit together enough to help.

Part of Jihoon feels like it's cheating. Another part knows cheating aside, it's probably morally bankrupt. 

But most of him feels like he's so close to triumph he can taste it.

-

Hacking into the medical departments patient info directory is easier than it should be. So is getting access to the brain scans of half a dozen coma patients. Part of Jihoon wants to pretend it’s because he’s just that great of a hacker, no firewall can escape him! But logically he knows it’s because the university doesn’t put enough of its budget into security, and there’s not really a reason to keep those scans under high security anyway. There’s not really anything anyone can _do_ with them. 

Unless they’re Jihoon. 

Once he gets all the files onto his computer and covers his tracks the best he can, he takes a look at the patient files. Two men, four women, most of them over the age of sixty. 

Except one. 

Park Woojin, age nineteen, ended up in a coma after a car crash two years ago. Functionally, his brain is fine, but he had been put in a medically induced coma after a severe spinal injury and he had never woken up. 

He’s perfect. He’s younger than Jihoon by a couple of years, but they’re close enough in age. Jihoon would rather work with an artificial intelligence with the mentality of someone his own age, rather than some sixty year old lady robot who would probably be racist or something.  

There’s a photo, too. A strong jawline and sharp eyes, tan skin and messy hair. Jihoon catches the hint of a snaggletooth behind his half smile. He’s cute. Jihoon will do his best to make the face accurate, at the very least, never hurts to have your research project be easy on the eyes. 

The coding only takes a couple weeks after that. It might take a normal person months, maybe years, but Jihoon mainlines Monster and pops caffeine pills until he feels like he’s flying and his hands shake as they type. He doesn’t sleep unless he collapses, waking hours later, groggy and sore, to repeat the process again. 

At the end of it, he has a boy on a lab table, sharp eyes looking blankly up at him. 

Jihoon plugs wires into the port at the back of the boy’s neck, makes sure everything is aligned properly and then sets to code to upload. It only takes a few minutes but it feels like an eternity, and Jihoon can’t take his eyes off the slowly inching progress bar. 

Eventually it lets out a little beep and proclaims ‘UPLOAD 100% COMPLETE’ in flashing blue letters. 

Jihoon waits. 

The android makes a little whirring noise as it turns on. Jihoon hadn’t programmed an external on/off switch. He figures that if he’s going to put a real human consciousness into a machine he should at least give it control over its own functions. 

There’s a long moment of silence, the gentle whirring and clicking of machinery a gentle white noise. 

The boy sits up. He looks at Jihoon and he’s got such a genuine look of confusion on his face that Jihoon has to resist punching the air in triumph. Despite the accuracy of the facial muscles, his eyes are oddly flat, like amber stones, shining with a dull light that doesn’t feel quite human.

For a moment they just stare at each other. 

The boy blinks and looks around the room before looking directly back at Jihoon. He tilts his head, and his voice is metallic and rough when he says, “Who are you?” 

Jihoon smiles. “My name is Jihoon. What’s yours?” 

It fascinates Jihoon to hear the whirring of the machinery click up a gear at the question, and when the boy shifts on the table it’s accompanied by a series of barely-there clicks. It wouldn’t be noticeable if the room wasn’t so quiet. 

“Woojin. I think. But I don’t know how I know that. I don’t…remember anything.” 

Jihoon has to stop himself from dropping his jaw in shock. Woojin shouldn’t remember his _name_. Jihoon had asked the question out of curiosity, to see how the software and integration would handle the lack of self-knowledge. 

Apparently better than expected. 

Jihoon feels his smile pull up further into a grin. This is going to be _interesting_. 

-

It’s been a month since Jihoon had finished coding Woojin’s software and he still hasn’t told his advisors. He’d spun some bullshit story about looking into new routes theoretically and they’d all given him the academia equivalent of sighs of relief. He’s using the extra time they've given him to study Woojin, and to befriend him.

It's odd, in a way, that Jihoon finds it so easy. Technically Woojin is something he's created, something he was able to bend to his will and desires.  Woojin resists bending, however. He's surprisingly stoic, mumbles when he talks eighty percent of the time and is more levelheaded than Jihoon would ever have expected.

When Jihoon explains that Woojin is a person, derived from a real human being, Woojin doesn’t get angry, to Jihoon’s surprise.

Woojin had shrugs before saying, "I was dead right? Or close enough? And now I’m not.” He is silent for a moment, thinking. “It seems like you wanted to create a person, and you want to treat me a like a person. That's good enough for me."

"Do you feel like a person?" Jihoon asks.

"I don't know what a person feels like," Woojin had responded. He looked a little melancholy, and it was odd to see his face make expressions that didn't reflect in his eyes. "But I feel like me."

Jihoon had jammed so much random code into his programming that he's not entirely sure what information Woojin has. He'd put a big dump of information somewhere in the middle of his code, history, science, philosophy, but Woojin also has built in wifi and Jihoon has no idea how much research he does on his own time, if at all. He's either done enough research to quell his curiosity about the world, or he was never a very curious person to begin with, because while he has the capability to learn (probably to be on par with Jihoon, or any other child genius) he doesn't really seem to care. 

What he wants is to dance.

When Woojin finds the movement data in his database practically forces Jihoon to sneak him into the dance studio the next night. Jihoon figures that breaking into university property is probably the least of his crimes at this point, which leads to Jihoon seated against one of the practice mirrors and Woojin crouched over Jihoon's phone where it’s hooked into the speaker system, picking a song to dance to. It's some hip-hop beat, basic and simple, and Jihoon perks up in interest.

Then Woojin walks into the middle of the studio and starts to dance.

Woojin has all the physical movement required for dancing stored in his database, but that shouldn't give him anything like style, or flow. Robots aren’t artists, they can’t be, art is emotion and reaction and sensation, not something that can simply be written and understood. If Woojin can dance, can make it beautiful not because it’s perfect but because it’s _his,_ Jihoon will know he’s succeeded. 

At first he’s awkward, not quite on the beat, his movements strange and too strong. But the longer he goes on, the better they get, smoothing out and pulling themselves together. He’s _learning._

Jihoon watches him for hours. The songs rotate through, Youtube’s autoplay function gifting them randomly with various beats and rhythms for Woojin to feel and learn.

Woojin seems to have a natural understanding of _how_ to dance, his movements fluid and inhumanly sharp, but full of confidence and charisma. As he dances he shoots Jihoon a grin, all teeth and sharp lines. His eyes are flat and dull and gold but they _glow_ and Jihoon doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything more beautiful in his life. 

Oh.

_Fuck._

-

Jihoon probably should have expected that things would go sideways eventually, but that doesn't stop the panic he feels when he walks onto campus to find a police car parked outside his lab building, lights on, sirens off. There's an officer at the entrance with an expression that says he's looking for someone, eyes scanning the crowd, focused. He's checking the IDs of every student that walks by.

Jihoon takes a moment to thank the universe that he's been keeping Woojin in his apartment since they went to the dance studio a couple weeks ago. Partly because it didn't seem right to force Woojin to sit in the lab all night alone while Jihoon cozied up on his couch with netflix, but partly because Jihoon wants to _be_ with Woojin.

Beyond fascination with this being he's created, he just enjoys talking to him, enjoys hearing his opinions on reality TV (that it seems fake and melodramatic) and how he feels about dogs (good) and what he thinks about Jihoons overabundance of throw pillows. (Woojin can't feel sensation, he can't taste, or get cold, or feel things that are soft or warm, all he can feel is pressure. Of course he thinks that Jihoon's pillow obsession is absurd. That doesn’t mean he’s right.)

Jihoon panics all the way back to his apartment. He barely stops himself from having an anxiety attack on the bus, and he spends the whole time developing contingency after contingency.

The police will probably realize soon that Jihoon didn't show up at his usual time, and then they'll look into student records for his address and then he and Woojin will have an hour at most before they get a warrant or something.

Jihoon's not entirely sure how these things work, but he's pretty sure he's fucked.

When he gets back to the apartment, Woojin is curled up on the couch in the way he does when he's locked in the depths of his own mind, accessing information from his database or the internet. He jerks up when Jihoon slams the door open, and looks on with concern as Jihoon locks and deadbolts it before sliding down to the floor and burying his head in his hands.

"The police were on campus Woojin, they were at my lab, they were looking for me,” Jihoon gasps. “They found out what I did, it was so illegal Woojin, you know that. Oh god. They're gonna take you away, Woojin, they're gonna lock you up, they're gonna lock _me_ up. I don't know what to do!"

By the end of it, Jihoon is breathing harshly, face pressed against the rough denim of his jeans, when he feels the not-quite-cool touch of Woojin's hand in his hair.

When he looks up Woojin is staring at him steadily, his eyes flat and cold in a way Jihoon has learned to find comforting, his mouth set in grim determination.

Woojin's hand slips from Jihoon's hair and moves to cradle his jaw, running his thumb along Jihoon's cheekbone.

"Jihoon, breathe." His voice is the rasp of metal and the whir of machinery, and it's focusing on the firmness of the words that allows Jihoon to finally snap back to reality.

"Woojin."

Woojin gives him a small smile. "I thought this might happen. I have a friend who can help us get out of the country."

What? Woojin ex Machina, apparently.

Jihoon packs up a backpack in a daze, grabbing his computer, chargers, phone, as many of his important notebooks as he can carry. Woojin shoves a couple changes of clothes at him. Oh yeah — those are important too. He grabs a couple of his most treasured stuffed animals and a framed photo of his childhood cat.

He doesn't have much else, at least not that he can justify. He stands in his apartment looking at his belongings, his pillow collection, his box set of game of thrones, the weird painting he'd found next to a dumpster one day on his walk back from campus.

He forces himself to take a deep breath.

A cool hand slips into his, gives a gentle tug.

He looks up, Woojin nods at him, sharply confident where Jihoon feels soft and afraid.

Despite that, Jihoon gives him a nod back.

They go.

**Author's Note:**

> i realized halfway through writing this that the plot was basically vixx's error but not sad so l m a o. 
> 
> also Woojin ex Machina is me calling myself the fuck out for not knowing how to end this ha ha ha
> 
> ty for reading!! kudos and comments appreciated!!
> 
> also ty to the mods of this challenge for putting up with me being a disaster and not finishing this until the night before it was supposed to be posted. ya'll are gems.


End file.
